The author gives two examples from observations made on himself to show that visual hallucinations based on heard music mainly reproduce the movement of the musical phrase, and he therefore concludes that the core of musical experience is kinæsthetic pleasure. He considers that the importance of this early narcissistic pleasure as an integrating factor in the growth of the body has not been sufficiently stressed.

He believes that the spatial quality of musical movement is based upon the infant's relation to the external world at a time when its concepts of self and not-self have not yet been completely formed, so that its control of the movements of its own body are still of a magical nature and involve an imaginary control over the movements of the outside world.